Doughnut Economics enters the textbooks

The concept of Doughnut Economics has been written into several International Baccalaureate (IB) textbooks, an influential start for getting the Doughnut into students’ first taste of the discipline.

Already in 2018, before the most recent changes to the IB Economics syllabus, the online textbook provider Kognity integrated the Doughnut into its macroeconomics section, the first textbook to do so. More recently, the Doughnut is appearing in other IB textbooks too, reflecting the inclusion of the model in the IB teacher support materials. 

The 2020 edition of Economics - the student textbook published by Oxford University Press - includes the Doughnut in its overview chapter on The Evolution of Economic Thinking. Chapter 1 of the textbook also includes the Doughnut Economics critique of the standard Circular Flow of Income diagram, and provides an alternative starting point to macroeconomic thinking by introducing the Embedded Economy diagram, from the book Doughnut Economics. This diagram depicts the economy - including the market, state, household and commons - as being embedded within society, and embedded within the living world.

This recognition of the economy as a subsystem of the living world is the essential starting point of ecological economics, and so it is significant that it is now included in the opening chapters of a mainstream high-school economics textbook. 

There's a great deal more to be changed in the economics textbooks, but we are excited about this auspicious start. Next stop, inclusion in the official syllabi!